GLOBAL ROCKSTAR UNITED – HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

Consider this — if you invite six artists to meet for the first time on the basis of some information you gathered online, how high are your chances that at least one of them will be stiff and arrogant, a diva with impossible requests, egotistical, alcoholic or drug addicted? 99%? The list of stereotypes is very long when it comes to musicians. Well, our musicians were almost too good to be true! The first time we sat down together for dinner, Ronny noticed that two out of our six artists refused to order alcohol and five out of six were non-smokers! “What kind of boring musicians did we invite here?!”. It quickly became a running-gag. But this isn’t enough to count our lucky stars.

What is you also consider — with 12 intercontinental flights, 14 airports and 26 take-offs and landings, not a single suitcase got lost. There were 13 inbound flights and they accumulated a total of zero minutes of delays arriving in Vienna. This means for the one flight from Christchurch-Sidney-Singapore-Dubai-Vienna that landed ten minutes behind schedule, enough flights arrived in advance. Two times an artist got upgraded to first class on his/her longest route. Nobody missed the alarm clock, not even once. Apart from two people with a slight air-conditioned-induced-cold by the last day, no one got sick, bedridden or hurt. And there were no quarrels or fights.

Well, actually there was one episode that could have ended in a fight, when Murray jumped in a taxi one evening and told the taxi driver the hotel’s name “Harry’s Place, please”. The taxi driver got inexplicably furious and kicked him out “Who the –bip!- is Harry, I don’t know your friends! Get out of my taxi you drunken tourist!”. Thankfully Murray immediately recognized the funny side of this story, got out giggling and called another taxi.

The video production was pretty high on misfortune, in the sense that Syssi knocked her hand on Jhanniel’s jaw dancing in front of the camera so her pinkie hurt for a couple of days, and Katie’s shoes were one size too small. Speaking of the video, we planned to shoot it on Tuesday completely outdoors since the weather in Vienna had been splendid for weeks and the weather forecast showed bright sun for the whole Global Rockstar United week. Then the forecast started changing and every day we observed rain and cold approaching… by Sunday morning the weather forecast for Tuesday was 18°C and solid rain. We panicked a bit. Then someone thought of the Expedithalle, just around the corner of the Global Rockstar office, so Monday morning Mirella started a big online hunt for the person in charge. By noon she reached him on the phone and he immediately granted us access to the Expedithalle to shoot the very next day, free of charge! Too early to call it our lucky star? Wait a second. We spent Tuesday morning working in the Expedithalle, rain outside, wondering what to do later instead of shooting in the streets of Vienna. As soon as we started wrapping up, Katie had changed her shoes and Syssi had realized she could still dance… the sun came out and we had the most beautiful light for the camera in the city center. May we say lucky star now?

Some of us thought they won the lottery by getting an invitation to Global Rockstar United alone or in being able to work in this project; for others it took a while (albeit a short while) to get infected with this special virus. Some of us think the lucky star is a personal guardian angel, some think of it as a deity, or destiny. My favorite idea is that if enough people do something positive together the whole world will resonate with positive and good things will happen — a sort of cosmic happy-go-luckiness. Either way, Global Rockstar United definitely has a lucky star that goes beyond statistics and wishful thinking. Let’s see how long it lasts, in the meantime… it is a nice feeling.